The Perfect Day Cruise from Tutukaka out to the Poor Knights Islands offers a way for non divers to experience this magnificent marine sanctuary. You’ll get the opportunity to snorkel, kayak and even stand-up paddle board in the waters whilst looking out for the unique marine life that call these island waters home.
The tour takes in the world’s largest sea cave and some of the archways and cliff faces of the islands. You’ll even learn how the islands got their name and more importantly what their proper names are and their importance to Ngāti Wai, the local iwi.
It’s a great day on the water, but does it live up to its name? We are going to let you know in this honest review of our time on the Perfect Day Cruise run by Dive! Tutukaka. Well break down everything you need to know to prepare for the day and what to expect when you are out on the water. Let’s dive in together so you can experience this perfect day for yourself!
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For full transparency, we did go on this tour as a gifted experience in exchange for some Instagram content and a blog post mention. However, we enjoyed the tour so much that we decided to make a dedicated blog post instead of just giving a paragraph in a guide to Northland. So rest assured that this is still a very honest review of our time on the tour.
The tour crew had no idea that we were there to share our experience and treated us no differently to the other members of the tour. We decided to create this blog post to help give a rundown of what to expect from your tour, to let you know all of our thoughts from the day and how to get the most out of this Perfect Day cruise. So, let’s dive in and tell you everything you need to know!
Tour Details
Location: Tutukākā Marina. Check in is across the road at the Dive! Tutukaka office. There is a giant yellow scuba tank outside, you can’t miss it! With plenty of parking available in Tutukaka for free.
Cost: $245 per adult. Check out their website here to book your tour.
Duration: Check in at 10:30 for an 11am departure, boat returns around 4pm.
When: We love an off season and did this in early May. There was only a small group of 14 people on the boat, which was fantastic! The water was still warm enough with a wetsuit and plenty of fish to see. If you come after May, the tour is run less often and on a winter schedule with an earlier start.
Additional Information: Make sure you book in advance no matter what time of year you are coming as tours fill up quickly in the summer months and limited tours are run in the off season.
Highlights At A Glance
Love a day on the water? Want to see the world’s largest sea cave? Or maybe you want to snorkel in one of the best spots in Aotearoa? If you answered yes to any or all of the above, then this is the tour for you!
The Perfect Day Cruise was high on our list of New Zealand experiences for quite some time. We love to go snorkelling and wanted to see what that’s like in Aotearoa. We also love getting to see anything that ranks so highly in the world. After all, how many people get to say they’ve been to the world’s largest sea cave? Now we can say that too.
So, what did we think of the tour as a whole? We give the Perfect Day Cruise a very respectable 8/10. There were a couple of small things that made it fall short of a 10, but we still believe it was a great day on the water, and recommend heading out on the tour when you are in Northland, New Zealand. Let’s dive into the specifics.
What We Packed
The tour company tells you to pack for a day on the beach. So that’s exactly what we did!
We took a backpack each with a towel, water bottle and a warm change of clothes. Of course, we had some camera gear too! We do kind of wish we had packed a little snack too, as we didn’t have lunch until our time in the water was up. We weren’t going to waste precious snorkelling time on eating, that’s for sure.
The rest of the gear you’ll need is provided by the tour. This includes a wetsuit, snorkel and flippers. They have a floating mat and flotation devices available if you aren’t confident in the water, but I wouldn’t recommend going on a tour like this if you aren’t comfortable swimming. Yes, the sightseeing is great, but the vast majority of the tour is centred around water time. Pack your sense of adventure too and get ready for a great day on the Moana (ocean).
Our Perfect Day Cruise of Poor Knights Islands
Check In
Check in isn’t until 10:30, giving you a lovely chill morning and plenty of time to head out to Tutukaka if you are staying in nearby Whangarei. We freedom camped about 5 mins away from the Dive! office so had a great morning enjoying a slow breakfast by the beach. We highly recommend getting here a little early and checking out the couple of shops and cute café in Tutukaka before going out on the boat.
Check in itself is super easy. Look for the giant yellow scuba diving tank next to the building. The staff are super friendly and just get you to read a safety form before handing over a reusable ticket and directing us to the boat. We loved that the ‘ticket’ is reused and not just a waste of paper.
Boat Ride To The Poor Knights Islands
A short walk across the road down to the wharf, and you’ll find the boat and the friendly crew you’ll spend the day with on the water. We handed over our lovely reusable ticket and got fitted for the gear we’d be using on the water. The tour includes snorkel masks, fins and wetsuit for everyone. You can also bring your own gear if you have it. There is an option to hire towels, but it’s easier to just bring our own.
We then headed up to the top of the boat and grabbed a seat ready for the ride over to the islands. There are some cool information books scattered around the boat, so grab one of these to get a look at the sea life you can expect to see later on today! Now is also the perfect time to take a sea sick tablet if you need them. The ride out wasn’t rough, but we don’t like to take the chance and always have a sea sick tablet before going out on a boat.
For us, the ride out to the islands was uneventful, in that we didn’t spot any sea life on the way over. We did see a few birds flying around, which was nice. The captain even pointed out a gannet to us. The crew had a bit of a chat with everyone on the boat whilst we were cruising along and once we got closer to the islands the captain told us a bit about the islands including how they got their names.
The main island is called Tawhiti Ravi and the smaller island is Aorangi. It was really nice to be told about the proper Māori names for the islands and not just the meaning behind ‘Poor Knights Islands’. The islands themselves are considered wāhi tāpu (sacred places) which is why it’s important to stay in the water and not touch the rocks of the islands themselves.
Anchored To The Islands
Whilst the crew are setting up for our time on the water, we got a briefing on safety and what to expect in the water. Make sure you pay attention to this bit, as we were also told where the best spots to snorkel are and where you can go into a little sea cave! With all the safety stuff done, it was time to pull on the wetsuits and get ready to explore. We noticed that lunch had been put out in that time too, but we decided the water was more important than food and went straight for the kayaks!
Kayaks
We love kayaking and did enjoy getting to kayak here. However, you are a little restricted in how far you are allowed to go in the kayaks. You have to keep in sight of the boat for safety reasons, which felt a bit restricting when there was so much coastline we wanted to explore!
Kayaking through an archway was the highlight of the kayak part of the trip. We did see a few birds too, which was pretty cool, especially the little blue kingfisher Tiff spotted on the rocks. We paddled around for about 10 to 15 min before we had covered all the area we could go and opted to trade the kayaks in for our snorkels. There are stand-up paddle boards on offer as well but given that it was a little wavy, and you couldn’t go any further with these than the kayaks we didn’t use them.
Snorkelling
We spent the rest of the time we were anchored up snorkelling. The water was surprisingly, not freezing, you could even call it a little bit warm! We were told it’s even warmer in the summer months as the East Australian Current sweeps through here, warming the waters and bringing some more tropical sea life with it.
The water is super clear, and it was really easy to see an abundance of fish everywhere we swam! There is seaweed and lots of life on the rocks so if you can dive for a better look you really should. The small sea cave was so cool to swim into and see a change in the sea life and sea floor as you went.
The fish are definitely the highlight here. There isn’t a huge amount of colourful coral, but the fish bring some gorgeous colour of their own. We spent as long as we could swimming in the water watching the fish! The crew let us know when it was time to get out and continue on with the rest of the tour.
Lunch
There is the option of a quick rinse off on the boat with a short shower (shower length depends on how many people are on your particular tour, as the water supply on the boat is limited). We got changed out of our wet clothes and headed for the lunch set up. We noticed that pretty much everyone else had opted to have lunch during the time we were anchored up.
There was still plenty of food left for us, though, and we didn’t miss out on any of the precious water time on offer to us. If you love being in the water, then we recommend saving lunch for when you are told the water time is over. Just don’t wait too long after getting out of the water to grab food, as the crew packed the lunch spread away before we set off on the tour of the islands.
The food on offer was wonderful. A vegetarian and a meat sandwich as well as a selection of salads, some fruit and an antipasto platter. We filled our plates and ate at the prow of the boat, soaking in some warm sunshine whilst the crew got the boat ready to set sail for the island tour.
One thing we found a bit disappointing about the lunch was the use of single use cutlery. The plates and cups and even teaspoons for hot drinks were all reusable, but the cutlery to eat the salad with was in a sealed paper package with a wooden fork, knife and a napkin. We shared the one fork so that we could create the least waste possible, but it was disappointing, especially given that everything else was reusable.
Poor Knights Islands Boat Tour
If you are after the best views of the largest sea cave in the world, then be sure to get a spot out on the prow of the boat once the anchors are up. You’ll be in the prime spot to see the incredible blue water of the sea cave and might even catch a drip or two from the roof above you!
The only downside we found to being out on the prow of the boat is that you can’t really hear anything over the speakers. We didn’t realise until we went back inside the boat after the sea cave that the captain was giving a more detailed history of the islands whilst driving out to the sea cave. We had missed most of the story, which was rather disappointing. (Tiff has since googled it and if you want to know more after going on the tour it is on their website here)
After spending some time in the sea cave, we drove out to some of the archways of the island. We stopped along the way to admire a giant school of fish swimming along the surface of the water! If any other marine life had been spotted, this is when the captain would take us over to see it. The arches of the island were pretty impressive, if the sea was a little calmer we would have been able to cruise under one! Sadly for us, the conditions weren’t safe to try.
Boat Ride Back To Tutukaka
After skirting around the front of the islands, we headed back toward the mainland. The crew and us included were all keeping an eye out for any whales or dolphins, but none wanted to come and play with us. It was still a really lovely ride back to Tutukaka watching the islands slowly shrinking away from us.
Free Photos
The crew take a few photos of everyone from the day on a GoPro, so make sure to check their Facebook page to see your photos! We’ve included the ones we got so you know what they’ll look like. They even shared a few pics they got of the sea life and the boat from the day, so you’ll have some photos to look back on, even if you don’t take any of your own. A really nice touch if you ask us!
So Was It Really A Perfect Day?
We rate our Perfect day tour an 8/10, so technically you can’t call the tour perfect. However, I would say the things that let the tour down as a whole didn’t distract from our day enough to not call it a wonderful day. We got to start the day off slowly, which we loved! We had an easy tour check in and loved our time out on the water.
It’s hard not to enjoy the great outdoors when the weather is good and there are plenty of things to do in and on the water. We loved getting to see into the world’s largest sea cave and enjoyed the boat ride there and back. It really was a lovely day. Perfect is, in our eyes, incredibly hard to achieve, literally everything would have to go right, the weather included. So whilst it wasn’t perfect in the literal definition of the word, it was very darn close!
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